Chapter 9 "Second Floor Grace"

May thought, surely this place would kill a perfectionist. She was not a perfectionist but she did have a streak of perfectionism that ran through her. May liked things to be clean and well kept. She liked things to be done right the first time, done with precision. This streak flared in The Sandbox because nothing was done right the first time. Nothing was done on time. Doors were hung slightly crooked or with the tops being overly shaved and small cracks seen through the wood. Windows never closed correctly and a constant dust covered the apartment. Clothes were cut uneven and when bought new, had little holes in them or dirt on them. In the beginning this annoyed May terribly. She was forced to leave it to the Father, as it was out of her control. She could not control the door makers or the window makers. She could not stop the locks from jamming or the curtains from hanging slanted slightly to the right. She realized she was deeply annoyed at these small things because in some way, they were still easier to try to fix then the bigger problems that slept outside her window or limped down the road. She tried to wrap her mind around all of the small things that bothered her, until one day she grasped she was twelve feet of grace above most of the world.

The water in the apartment was not working. The electricity was on and off. May was dirty. Her feet were dirty, which bothered her more then just about anything. She washed her feet and walked out of the bathroom, leaving imprints of clean footprints on the dusty floor heading to the kitchen. Annoyed, she poured herself a cup of warm water, after-all, the refrigerator was broken. She let her mind criticize the entire city. Who was responsible for keeping the water running? The electricity? The dust? She had showered a half hour earlier and was sweating again already.

She opened a window, ready to scream and looked down. That is when she saw them. There in the dark of the night lay an entire family in the middle of a dirt field sleeping on two metal bed frames with no mattresses. Right of them sits a slide resting on a large rock because the ladder went missing a long time before they moved to the garbage filled field. May had seen the children happily climb the rock in order to go down the slide. Left of the family a broken tractor lays rusted under a few layers of dust. May noticed the family, now sound asleep, had no roof over their head and was surrounded by the wall of May’s apartment, and three roads. Time and time again cars wobbled right by their heads on their way into or out of the city. If that was not enough to break May of her perfectionism, nothing would. She looked up to the Father and thanked him for cracked windows, new fridges that did not work, thick heat that pasted dirt to her, and four concrete walls that at least kept the outside, out and the inside in.

The tears ran down her cheeks and she thanked the Father for the life she was born into in the US, for the luxuries she took for granted and the conveniences she never questioned. There was no explanation for why she lived at least twelve feet above poverty level her entire life. She was humbled to live on the second floor of grace rather then on the dirt ground. She went to bed damp from sweat. She did not care so much that her dirt embedded feet hung comfortably over her soft mattress because she realized twelve feet below a family shared the simple metal frame that held them slightly above the dirt, and they were thankful.